Jerome Eteve

Mason - A Template system for us programmers

2013-03-13T17:24:07Z

Templating Modules are a bit like editors. Every web application developer has a favourite one. And every template system is someone's favorite.

Mine is Mason. But not because the Perl MVC tutorials are full of examples using Mason. Not because it's the fastest (use xSlate if you want to trade speed for flexibility). Not because it's the most popular. It's my favourite for a very plain reason: It makes me more productive and allows me to develop web GUIs using all the powerful features a programmer should biterly miss if they are taken away. That includes writing Perl code :P

I never heard of a business that went down because they didn't have fast enough CPUs, so I'm not fussy about trading a few CPU cycles for elegance, ease and speed of development.

Enough talking. Here's my contribution to the template holy war.

The only bad thing about Mason

2013-03-02T20:06:39Z

At the moment, I'm writing a presentation about Mason2. The goal is to somehow convince my colleagues to consider using Mason. Instead of Template Toolkit.
As part of it, I thought I'd do a bit of performance benchmarking against Template Toolkit. So I put together a reasonably complex mini set of templates using both systems. Well, as complex as TT can take in reality. Which is not very much.

But anyway, let's jump straight to the bad news.

Give your application a shell (and never write any ad-hoc scripts again)

2013-02-21T14:07:39Z

As developers, we sometimes have to help operations going smoothly by fiddling with the data "by hand" because there's no GUI to allow people doing some rare and obscure things. One common way of doing it is by connecting to the DB and writing some SQL. But often, accessing your database is not enough, because you need your application code to be run.

And for that, you need a shell.

Friday Time Waster: Watch the world go by in ASCII with Reuters' API

2012-11-23T14:09:43Z

I've recently released WebService::ReutersConnect. It's a Perl modules that interfaces with the ReutersConnect's API in OO style. To demonstrate it and hopefully entertain you on this Friday, here's how to use it to watch the world go by in glorious ASCII and from the comfort of your command line. To put it shorter: The perfect Friday Time Waster.

Understanding Unicode/UTF8 in Perl

2012-09-26T09:26:30Z

I'm not a Unicode Guru, but working with third parties, I often find that a lot of people consistently fail to get the basics right about Unicode and encoding. So here's yet another set of slides about unicode/utf8 in Perl.

It's not meant to be a comprehensive presentation of all Unicode things in Perl. It's meant to insist on a couple of guidelines and give some pointers to get a good start writing a unicode compliant application and avoiding common issues.

View them here.

The goodness of testing

2012-08-22T09:22:03Z

This is not strictly related to Perl, but I was thinking about my practice of testing recently and I've come to some conclusions, some of them proving to be a bit controversial. Read more here and have your say!